Label: 101 Films
Region Code: B
Rating: Cert. 15
Duration: 88 Minutes
Audio: English PCM Stereo 2.0 and DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Timo Vuorensola
Cast: Sydney Craven, Imran Adams, Jarreau Benjamin, Matt Barkley, Peter Brooke, Ocean Navarro, Gary Graham, Paul Dee Wallace
Director Timo Vuorensola (Iron Sky) helmed this CGI heavy soft-reboot of the Jeepers Creepers franchise, a series with three previous entries, two of them pretty solid, but it was a franchise with some baked-in troubles due to the director of those three films having an unsavory past which involves a sex-crime he served a sentence for. Cue this new reboot, which opens with a prologue set in Louisiana in the 60's, with Dee Wallace (The Howling) and Gary Graham (Robot Jox) driving through the country where they witness the Creeper dumping a body down a hole and then menacing them in his beat up truck with the familiar BEATINGU license plate - it's basically re-doing the opening of the original film. This is then revealed to be a re-enactment of the Creeper legend that Creeper-fanboy Chase (Imran Adams, TV's Hollyoaks) and his girlfriend Laine (Sydney Craven, TV's Eastenders) are watching on YouTube. In this film the Creeper is a real-life Louisiana legend and the subject of several films - which adds a very thin layer of wink-wink-see-what-we-did-there? to the proceedings. The coupe are on their way to the Horror Hound festival, an chintzy looking outdoor cosplay event.
On their way they stop off at a roadside antiquities where the witchy proprietor, who sort of figures in happenings later in the film, sells them a map to the festival. When they get there they walk around, joke about what if a killer is lurking among the masked, and sure enough the Creeper is there and already amassing a body count. The couple end up winning a prize, which is a trip to the dilapidated old plantation house for a Creeper themed escape-room challenge - but as it turns out the festival organizers are a Cult of Thorn-esque group who worship the Creeper and Chase and Laine are being offered up as sacrifices, and they have to fight their way out.
The film is a soft-reboot that attempts to make some superficial changes to the mythology, seemingly just for the sake of doing so, such as the Creeper cult and Laine having psychic visions, but it feels like leftovers from the original series refried and executed half-assed. Towards the end of the film when we get to the Creeper lair there's a over reliance on digital backgrounds that don't look great, but they do have a certain hyper-reality edge to them that I didn't completely hate, but they're are not great. More problematic is that our protagonists are dullsville, they're given them some drama to mull over but it's never fleshed out, like the fact that Chase is secretly planning to propose to Laine, and she is pregnant but has not yet told him, and is having psychic-visions, but most of that means absolutely nothing to the story at large.
The look of the Creeper is a pale imitation of the original film, having watched the first film quite recently I can say it's just bad by comparison, it feels cheap, and the kills are lame, tame and absolutely unoriginal. I ill say I did like the physical acting beneath the ale-up though. The original film might have some baggage to it as far as the problematic director, but it at least was a well-made film, it created tension, atmosphere and some memorable kills - this one doesn't have any of that, this is much less a franchise Reborn and more of an Miscarriage.
Screenshots from the 101 Films Blu-ray:
